Flint Knits

Thanks to heaps of help from Minty, and tireless test-knitting and thoughtful feedback from Alice, Brenda, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elspeth, Laura, Leigh, Mai, Mitt, Preita, and Whitney, the pattern for Elinor’s Mittens is available! $5 US gets you a download of the PDF file.

[ravelry link]
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These super-warm mittens feature a fat two-color cable, a tweedy palm, and a striped thumb with a swirled decrease at the tip.

I’d recommend this project for intermediate or advanced knitters–you don’t have to have experience with multicolor cables, but you should be comfortable with both cables and colorwork. The 6-page pattern includes charts for the cable, palm, and decreases.

Size is determined by what size needles you use (see specs below). Even at the looser gauges, though, the colorwork and cables mean these will be warm and wooly. And they knit up surprisingly fast in worsted-weight yarn. I recommend using a darker main color, and a lighter or brighter yarn for the contrast color.

FINISHED MEASUREMENTS: hand circumference = 6 (6.5, 7, 7.5, 8, 8.75) inches, unstretched.

GAUGE: 32 (30, 28, 26, 24, 22) stitches per 4” (10cm) in palm pattern, after blocking.

NEEDLES:

• US size 2 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) needles of your choice for small-circumference circular knitting, or size needed to get gauge for your size
• US size 2 (2, 2, 3, 4, 5) needles, for cuff (or needles 1-2 sizes smaller than for hand)

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As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments on the pattern.
And thanks for your support!
xo, Pam

Thanks to all the folks who offered to test-knit. I’ve now got about a dozen people working hard, out of the goodness of their hearts, to make sure I get to start selling that mitten pattern at the beginning of the new year. People are so freaking nice.

In the meantime, I finally wrote up a tutorial for that little baby hat+mittens set I made earlier this year. Check it out on Ravelry, and on my Free Patterns page.

[wee leafy baby set]

Oh, and I made a hat! With a giant pom pom! Woo!

(Seriously, check out that pom. It is massive.)

pattern: Snowball Hat, by Kate Himmelberg
yarn: Lion wool ease thick + quick
[raveled]

UPDATE: Thanks so much to all the folks who offered to test-knit. I’ve got plenty of volunteers now. Seriously–thanks!

The middle west US is covered in snow, which means those of us who are responsible for cars or porches or sidewalks or pets spend a lot of time moving the stuff around. Which is cold. Which means … mittens.

I recently did a mitten swap with some friends, and came out of it with a gorgeous pair of Chevaliers from Ms. Fricknits.

Thanks, J!

I knitted for Elinor, and I decided to design my own pattern.

They feature a fat two-color cable running up the back, extra-long cuff, and a stripey thumb with swirling decreases (thanks to some clever tweaking from Minty). And, because they’ve got colorwork and cables in worsted-weight wooly-wool, they are WARM.

I’m planning to make them my very first pattern-for-sale. Want to test-knit a pair? Let me know! You should be an advanced knitter comfortable with colorwork and with cables, and you should have a couple skeins of Cascade 220 or other 100% wool worsted-weight yarn to devote to the cause.

ETA: Also, could you please include a link to your Ravelry projects or a blog or Flickr set or something? I suddenly have this fear that “advanced” and “comfortable” are relative terms. Thanks!

ETA: MORE maths corrected, plus I added sizes XS and XXS. Check out the revised sizing. The re-worked file was created on June 10 at 2:50pm, and should say “Version 2.0″ at the top.

As soon as a zillion people started queuing my sweater pattern on Ravelry, I knew I was going to find a huge mistake. I just knew it.

And guess what!

I surely did!

Like, a really big one.

A really, really, massively big one.

Luckily, it’s not til after the raglan increases, so hopefully not many people have gotten that far yet. But, yeah, that part where it says to add 13 yarn-overs? That’s bunk. It’s supposed to be a number between 38 and 41, depending on your size. I have no idea where the number 13 came from. Let’s not even discuss it.

If you downloaded the pattern before June 9 at 12:30am Eastern US time, get the new one!

And please enjoy this recycled photo of my cat Wilma wearing yarn.

I mean, how can you be angry at someone who has such a precious kitty? Answer: you cannot.

Thanks in advance for your patience and generosity and not, you know, kicking my ass or sending hate mail.

If you haven’t entered the contest for the woolgirl.com gift certificate, there’s still time! Go! Go!

Big thanks for all the kind responses to the February Lady Sweater!

If you’re interested in making a version that’s more faithful to Elizabeth Zimmerman’s original, several folks have made larger versions of the original baby sweater, by doing some serious math. I mentioned Jenny’s in my last post (could she be any cuter?), and you should also check out this super-gorgeous version. In fact, I just found out that Ravelry has a whole discussion going on about how to re-work the math for an adult size, with a few pictures of finished ones. (Shoulda known–there’s a Ravelry thread for everything.) And someone even made a grown-up version just by using superbulky yarn and the original pattern.

EZ’s original baby sweater is, of course, fucking brilliant in its construction. It has a lot of increases over a small number of rows, to create a rounded shape that will suit a wee baby’s round body. The pattern I wrote, on the other hand, is just a basic top-down raglan. This construction means that, instead of fitting a baby’s round body, it’s made to be fitted across an adult’s shoulders and upper back, then drape all swingy-like down from the bust (yeah, no, I could not get a job writing for J. Peterman). If you’re familiar with top-down raglan construction, you really don’t even need the pattern, just this one-sentence command: “knit a top-down raglan using EZ’s gull stitch pattern, with a row of 40-45 increases just above the bust.”

Finally, some folks have emailed because they’ve had problems making the raglan increases work. The issue seems to be around the phrase, “mark the next stitch.” This is not the same as “place a marker.” Rather, you mark the next stitch you knit. You can either place a marker on either side of that stitch, or slide a split ring marker through the knitted stitch, so that you know to put a m1 increase on either side of it for the raglan shaping. If you’re good at reading your knitting, you don’t even need a marker–just increase on either side of the same stitch each time. Hope this helps! (I’ll also go clarify in the pattern itself.)

I do actually have other knitting projects, too! I just started a pair of Sandra’s Charade socks in some Wollmeise sockenwolle that Kris sent me a while back.

But I’m not sure I love the striping. Should I embrace the striping? Or frog it and find a better pattern/yarn match? I beg you, be ruthless in your advice